I. Field
The following description relates generally to communication systems, and more particularly to error correction and resource efficiency in a wireless network.
II. Background
In communication systems, transmission of information is prone to error. The errors may be introduced due to ambient thermal noise or interference from another device operating in the same frequency band. Many current wireless technologies incorporate some sort of an error detecting code to selectively reject received frames that are erroneous. For example, the 802.11 standard as promulgated by the Institute of Electrical or Electronic Engineers (IEEE), herein referred to as 802.11, includes a 32-bit cyclical redundancy code (CRC) to check for errors. In addition to error detecting codes, many current wireless technologies also incorporate error correcting codes. These codes, implementing redundancy in coding, can correct bit errors introduced by the channel. The strength of the error correction code—that is, the ability of the error correction code to correct errors, is dependent on the amount of redundancy that is introduced into the bit stream.
802.11-based wireless network systems do not incorporate error correction mechanisms for correcting received frames that contain errors. One reason for not incorporating an error correction mechanism is that the introduction of the extra information bits in the frame that are needed for error correction will result in an underutilization of bandwidth resources. It would be desirable to use any pre-existing but redundant bits in a particular frame to carry error correction information while not increasing frame size. Further, any proposed solution should not require significant hardware changes.
Consequently, it would be desirable to address one or more of the deficiencies described above.